DEAF03 Symposium

Information is Alive was the symposium at DEAF03.

DEAF03 Symposium

1

Mar 2003

-

2

Mar 2003

10:45 to
17:45

location:
Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Museumpark 18-20

Information is Alive focuses on archives as unstable, plastic,
living entities. Information storage, processing and transmission
take place on many levels: individually, in our memories;
collectively, in stories, rituals, laws, celebrations, games,
concepts, language, image and architecture; biologically,
in fossils and in bodies as living forms. In the last twenty
years information has been stored and retrieved more and
more by means of digital technologies.

Unlike more classical
archive forms, digital databases need not be ordered hierarchically,
for they are made accessible through ever more complex linking
technologies which no longer need to work linearly, as they
did with old-style computers. Search engines can be designed
to find the proverbial needle in the haystack. A digital
archive, like the memory, need not be a static system. The
value of what is stored lies in what it means for the present.
We reuse and recombine our past to create the present. Memory
is something that operates in the present and through that
act is continually updated.

Research into the neurological,
social, cultural and evolutionary function of memorizing
or information storage can provide us not just interesting
knowledge in its own terms, but also models and tools for
understanding the possibilities of nonlinear computing and
nonlinear database linking technologies. The question then
becomes whether and how unexpected and artistically interesting
developments can arise when kinds of information that were
separate before the arrival of the digital computer are
combined through the use of agents or the application of
meta data.